Data loss can be disastrous. After a complete meltdown of their storage, a social bookmarking site lost all their user's data. Unable to restore it, the once successful company was killed overnight. You don't have to be a big company to suffer from data loss. In fact, losing irreplaceable photos or videos of friends and family may be even more heartbreaking than losing your business.
Thankfully, there are many options available to you for data backup, so you never have to feel a sinking feeling should your own storage devices fail.
The social bookmarking site mentioned above would still be in business today had they implemented a data backup plan. Data backup routinely copies your files from your primary storage device to some other storage device. With such a plan in place, a storage failure disaster only costs you the data lost between your most recent backup and the time of the failure. Compared with what you have to lose, data backup is an affordable way to give yourself some peace of mind that your files will always be there when you need them.
Once you've decided that you want to keep your data safe, you need to know how to backup data. There are two aspects of data backup that you need to consider when putting a backup plan in place. The first is the method through which you will backup the data. How will you handle the process of copying the data over? Will it be automated? If so, by what means? The second consideration is the medium through which you will backup the data. Will you have another hard drive locally, or will you use a cloud solution?
Data backup software
The most primitive way to backup your data is to manually copy it over to the backup storage solution at regular intervals or whenever you feel it makes sense to do so. While this works, it isn't very foolproof. It's easy to forget to backup the data and takes a long time to manually copy everything over. Instead, most people use software like WinZip, which lets you automatically copy whichever folders you want to backup. WinZip even has the benefit of compressing your data, so you can fit more backups on your backup storage.
Cloud backup
There are two ways that you can use cloud backup. One is as a storage-only solution. With these types of solutions, you'll have a cloud storage provider and use a tool like WinZip to automatically push your backups to that provider. Some cloud storage providers will automatically keep the data on your local drive in-sync with the cloud drive data. These options provide maximum safety for your data because the backup is located in a completely different location, so a disaster like a fire can't wipe out all of your storage.
Hard drive cloud backup
Many routers can also function as a data backup service. By connecting a hard drive to your router, you can create your own private cloud backup. You can use the software provided by your router, or if there was no software provided, you could use a tool like WinZip. Unlike remote cloud storage, a local drive will not require a constant internet connection or have potentially large bandwidth usage. If you use a local storage drive, you can often get insurance that will try to recover your data should something go wrong.
Now that all our lives are digital, data loss is even more frightening than it was in generations past. All our important data and meaningful memories are stored on our digital devices. Keeping that data safe is important to protect yourself from potential catastrophe. Thankfully, with cloud storage providers and tools like WinZip, doing so is easy.
